Top 180 Narrator Quotes & Sayings

There's always a version of me who is the narrator. And I make myself look better than other people.

I don't mind a narrator who's self-deceiving, but the clues for their truth have to be there for the reader to see.

The eagerness of a listener quickens the tongue of a narrator.

The universal narrator knows all and can enter a character's head any time he chooses.

I wanted to do a collection where the narrator is constant throughout, so that there's a little unity.

The thing I love about Dickens is the omniscient, omnipotent narrator, and the great confidence of the narrator, which marks 19th-century novelists in general and Dickens in particular.

There's something uniquely exhilarating about puzzling together the truth at the hands of an unreliable narrator.

Confession makes you a more trustworthy narrator.

Hitchcock makes it very clear to us. There's an objective and a subjective camera, like there's a third- and a first-person narrator in literature.

I'm interested in getting deep into a person's consciousness and doing so in ways in which the narrator is secondary to the character's own thoughts.

If a writer is always trying to keep a narrator emitting a tone of complete knowingness, it can become false.

I used to be a narrator for bad mimes.

I think every first-person narrator in a novel should be compromised. I prefer that word to unreliable.

In 'A Scandalous Woman,' the eventually distraught narrator watches as her high-spirited friend is beaten down - literally and figuratively - by Ireland's pious customs.

Yet one new trend I do like coming from mainstream publishers right now is memoirs tied to research that explores the narrator's dilemma.

I go straight from thinking about my narrator to being him.

Writing in the first person, you immediately open yourself up to the idea that there's a connection between you and the narrator.

It is hard to create a first-person narrator that can be a child and yet is able to take in enough information for the narrative to be legible to the reader.

One naturally identifies to some extent with an "I" female narrator going through something that you recognize whether you've gone through it or not.

I prefer to be a director and a narrator rather than a writer.

I can't reasonably pretend to be a transparent and omniscient narrator who brings no personal perspective. That person doesn't exist.

This is what you learned in college," the narrator tells you early on. "A man desires the satisfaction of his desire; a woman desires the condition of desiring.

In a thriller, the camera's an active narrator, or can be.

If someone tells you that George Bush is not the 43rd president of the United States, they might be engaged in wishful thinking, or denial, but if they make that claim, it's either true or false! And you can assess that, regardless of whether there's an omniscient narrator, or an unreliable narrator, or it's shot in vérité, or it's manipulated, it's agitprop, whatever! It makes no difference! It's a style!

Ezra clapped his hands. "all right," he said. "In addition to the books we're reading as a class, I want to do an extra side project on unreliable narrators." Devon Arliss raised her hand. "what does that mean?" Ezra strode around the room. "well, the narrator tells us the story in the book, right? But what if... the narrator isn't telling us the truth? Maybe he's telling us his skewed version of the story to get you on his side. Or to scare you. Or maybe he's crazy!

When the reader and one narrator know something the other narrator does not, the opportunities for suspense and plot development and the shifting of reader sympathies get really interesting.

I always thought of documentaries as films through which you find your voice as a narrator.

I would love to play a sociopath or, like, an unreliable narrator.

It is rare and almost impossible for a novel to have only one narrator.

I not only want to engage with my fans but want to truly show and express my experiences and potential as a narrator and a story teller.

***A Last note from your narrator*** I am haunted by humans.

Never trust a narrator whose opening gambit is to insist he's not mad.

What is most important to me is that my narrator's voice is believable, and that, though it is clearly an absolute fiction, it has the emotional resonance of memoir.

The narrator of a documentary often comes in at the last minute and takes some of the glory they don't deserve.

When the narrator says, 'This is a story without surprises,' most of the time, this is not what happens.

If you have a single narrator, a person like an "I" - "'I' did this" and "'I' did that" - it automatically solves the most difficult problem in writing.

I think every first-person narrator in a novel should be compromised. I prefer that word to 'unreliable.'

The third person narrator, instead of being omniscient, is like a constantly running surveillance tape.

For the black author, and even the ex-slave narrator, creativity has often lain with the lie - forging an identity, 'making' one, but 'lying' about one, too.

I really believe that readers are smart and sophisticated enough to realize that the author is not the narrator of his novels.

In writing, the connection between storyteller and audience is just as important. By using some subtle devices, a narrator can reach out to the reader and say, 'We’re in this together.'

A poet or prose narrator usually looks back on what he has achieved against a backdrop of the years that have passed, generally finding that some of these achievements are acceptable, while others are less so.

The omniscient narrator is a bizarre technique, when you think about it, and no one uses it much anymore. But for the novels I want to write, it's the only approach that makes sense to me.

When someone walks in and you say "a six-foot-tall man," you miss the opportunity to describe what a six-foot-tall man would look like to your narrator, because how the narrator describes a six-foot-tall man says more about the narrator than about the man.

Typically in my novels the narrator tells a story by remembering, and the memories are colored by this and colored by that. So the whole universe of the novel tends to be framed by the narrator's memories and thoughts.

Almost all of the stories in The Matchmaker, the Apprentice, and the Football Fan are told in the first person, yet, depending on the angle and distance of the narrator, they exert different effects. The best are those in which the speaker never poses as an objective outsider. (...) Other stories are damaged by the urge to distance the narrator.

I know I love a novel with an unreliable narrator, and I think many readers do as well.

One of the strategies for doing first-person is to make the narrator very knowing, so that the reader is with somebody who has a take on everything they observe.

I almost always use first person voice in my novels. It has its limitations, but it gives a sense of immediacy that's hard to create with an anonymous, all-seeing narrator.

As a writer I'm not an explainer, really. I'm a narrator. I mistrust explanation.

Simply adored Timothy Schaffert's The Coffins of Little Hope: the voice of Essie, the narrator, is terrific & the last line blew me away.

Usually, when I write a novel, it takes me about 100 pages to figure out the voice of the narrator.

Using a first-person narrator is simply a matter of hearing the voice inside yourself.

My first job after my retirement from baseball was as a narrator for the Eastman Philharmonica.

Nothing is as important as a likable narrator. Nothing holds a story together better.

I think every narrator is an unreliable narrator. In its classic definition - an unreliable narrator is one who reveals something they don't know themselves to be revealing. We all do that.

I'm never a reliable narrator, unbiased or objective.

A passenger on a road journey is in the hands of a driver; a reader embarking on a book is in the hands of a narrator.

Everyone is interesting except the narrator in a first-person story.

My preferred style is to write in first person, so I always have to play around with possible narrator voices until I find something that works.